The Aromatic Presser Case

Administration officials who are running for cover in the case of Teamster President Jackie Presser can’t say that nobody warned them. A White House counsel advised President Reagan’s staff nearly two years ago to put some distance between themselves and Presser.

They didn’t listen. And perhaps inevitably the story of Presser and nearly three years of investigation into charges that he padded the payroll of the union’s Cleveland local has broken out of a tight little circle of Washington officials and their months of tight little meetings on the case.

What caused it to break out was the fact that after all of the investigation and meetings in Washington, and with a Cleveland grand jury apparently poised to indict the Teamster official, the Justice Department has decided to drop the case.

If the Presser matter does not go to court, it certainly must go to Congress, where the truth can be pried loose under oath.

One thing that makes the Presser case special is that he is the only major labor leader who supported Reagan for election in 1980 and for reelection in 1984. That in itself is an embarrassment, in view of a federal strike-force finding that Presser should be indicted on charges that he authorized tens of thousands of dollars in pay-checks for union officials who never showed up for work.

But Presser also has been an informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, an organization not given to saying who informs it about what.

The bureau has been so squeamish about its relationship with Presser that it once denied that it even had one. It is possible that the Justice Department decided not to go to court because the bureau did not want lawyers rummaging around in its Presser files.

It is also possible that, after reviewing a 100-page memorandum on the charges, federal lawyers really do not think that they could get a conviction. That would be possible even though one “ghost employee” involved pleaded guilty to accepting the paychecks, one was convicted and two others were convicted of embezzlement on other charges.

It is possible that a case once again has fallen victim to Washington’s jurisdictional jealousies. The investigators on the strike force were drawn not from the FBI but from the office of the Labor Department’s inspector general.

All these explanations exist independently of still another possibility--that someone intervened on Presser’s behalf because of his loyalty to the President. That thought obviously has occurred within the Administration. Nobody is talking for attribution, but one of the anonymous sources made a point of saying that Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III took no part in the decision.

Without confirming that the case has been dropped, a Justice Department spokesman says that it will be several days before there is an official statement. But it is too late for official statements. Only a court or Congress could put to rest the questions raised by the government’s handling of the case, let alone the questions about the strike-force findings about Presser.